“Drain the Ocean” will be aired Sunday, August 16, 2 p.m. on the National Geographic channel. The special put computer-generated imagery and digital mapping technology to imaginative use through showing what the oceans would look like if all their water was emptied through an imaginary drain. The result would be a landscape far more dramatic than anything on dry land, including a 40,000 mile-long mountain range, the world’s deepest canyon and widest plains, and bizarre, bioluminescent life forms

Ordinarily, losing almost all of one's instruments would be considered a severe setback to any scientist. But when Maya Tolstoy, a marine geophysicist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and the Earth Institute at Columbia University, recently learned that two-thirds of the seismometers she placed on the floor of the Pacific Ocean were trapped more than 8,000 feet (2500 meters) underwater, it turned out to be an extremely good sign.

Marie Tharp, a pathbreaking oceanographic cartographer at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, co-creator of the first global map of the ocean floor and co-discoverer of the central rift valley that runs through the Mid-Atlantic Ridge died Wednesday August 23 in Nyack Hospital. She was 86.